7 PM to 2 AM: Client finally sends the financial information, but it’s horribly formatted. Your VP tells you to fix it and update the CIM and management presentation, which takes several hours.

In that 17-hour day, you did only ~12 hours of work, and only a few hours of work that required mental energy, but you still had to be in the office and “on call” the entire time.

So, if you “work” 80 hours per week, yes, you’re in the office from 9 AM to 1 AM on weekdays, or from 9 AM to 11 PM on weekdays with a 10-hour day on Sunday.

But you’re also spending a good chunk of that time waiting for information or assignments or doing tasks that don’t require much mental energy.

Why Are You in the Office So Much?

The in-office hours are insane for three main reasons that haven’t changed since the 1980s:

Huge Clients Pay Your Bank Huge Fees: When a company is paying your bank $50 million, $10 million, or even $1 million to advise on a deal, you have to do whatever it wants at any time of the day.

Unpredictable Work Demands: Unlike with engineering projects – or even audits at Big 4 firms – it’s almost impossible to use “project planning” for deals in investment banking because the process is random and unpredictable.

Division of Labor Failures: And banks can’t hire more people to reduce the workload because one person has to “own” each aspect of a deal. Multiple people writing a CIM or building a model at the same time would be like writing a novel with multiple authors (i.e., a bad idea).

You could add a fourth reason to this list as well: The culture.

Working long hours to “pay your dues” is deeply embedded into the culture of financial services firms.

Even if banks’ business models were to change, long hours in the office might continue because… well, you have to work a lot. Just because.

Here’s a bit more detail on each factor above:

Huge Clients Pay Your Bank Huge Fees

If a single executive at a client company gets upset over something, he/she could immediately cancel the deal, resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenue for your bank.

Bankers sell their time and attention – not a tangible product – and they need to provide it, even if a client calls at 1 AM on Christmas with an urgent request.

If a bank did 1,000 deals per year and earned $50,000 per deal, service standards would decline.

A Managing Director or Partner won’t stay in the office until 4 AM editing font sizes in a presentation; he/she might still work 60 hours per week, but most of that time is spent in meetings, on calls, or traveling to meet clients.

Finally, some boutique banks offer significantly better hours.

This one is the exception rather than the rule, but there are some small banks where bankers work 40-50 hours per week and still close multiple deals per year.

They do that by using existing contacts and relationships, working on only inbound deals, and avoiding all pitches.

They still have to complete marketing documents for clients in sell-side M&A deals, but they avoid pointless administrative work.

The senior bankers at these firms don’t necessarily care about maximizing revenue; they aim to earn enough without killing themselves 24/7.

So, Will the Hours Ever Change?

To their credit, banks have acknowledged the ridiculous hours and attempted to improve working conditions for junior bankers.

But junior bankers have criticized these schemes for several reasons:

Some policies are a joke. You get “2 hours of personal time per week?” What are you supposed to do with that?

When a live deal heats up, these policies go out the window.

These policies have shifted more work to the Sunday-Thursday period.

Being free from Friday night to Sunday morning isn’t a real “weekend off.”

These criticisms are valid, but they also miss the point of these policies.

The point of a “protected weekend” isn’t to reduce the total hours you work, but to make your schedule more predictable.

About the Author

Brian DeChesare is the Founder of Mergers & Inquisitions and Breaking Into Wall Street. In his spare time, he enjoys memorizing obscure Excel functions, editing resumes, obsessing over TV shows, traveling like a drug dealer, and defeating Sauron.

Comments

Hi Brian, I am a recent grad of a semi-target school. I have never had too strong willingness to do banking, AM, other than being influenced by people around me. I always perceive myself as being more entrepreneurial and saw lots of people who are not in finance made their fortune other ways. I had an internship at middle office at BB but didn’t join full time. I have started my own company for the past year, but it didn’t go as I expected even though we achieved some successes. I am considering to go back to finance now, but have no clue where/how can I start over again??

I am going to be applying for a full time role for a VC division for one of my city’s larger employers after working in advisory for about 18 months. i interned at a PE firm for about 2 months in the summer in between my sophomore and junior year. the problem is that the internship was good, but i wasnt exposed to modeling or analysis during my time there because it was only 2 months. i mainly screened for industries and analyzed companies. how should i translate that onto my resume?

Write about the bigger picture and how your work contributed to deals closing and don’t go into the specifics of what *you* did that much, instead focusing on the eventual results of your work. And then practice building models for the deals retroactively so you can speak to something in interviews.

I’m a sophomore at a semi-target in NYC, currently doing PWM at a BB. I recently purchased your Networking Toolkit + Interview Guide in an effort to land an internship at a boutique IB for this summer. Do I still have a chance at landing interviews, and hopefully an offer, for this summer, or is April too late to do so? And if it’s not too late, around when do boutiques stop looking for interns?

Thanks for signing up! It would be tough to win interviews/offers at this stage because most banks finished IB recruiting about 6 months ago. There are still some boutique firms that might be hiring, so it is worth reaching out to them to see. You might have better luck going for small private equity firms (see one of the case studies in the Networking Toolkit) because they’re often more open to hiring interns year-round and don’t follow as rigid a schedule.

I am doing a Pre-Test on a questionnaire to capture data on: DETERMINANTS OF PERFORMANCE OF MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS IN THE FINANCIAL SECTOR IN KENYA. Can I post it to you to help or guide me to where I can get this help. I am really earger to bring something new in the industry in the area of mergers and acquisitions.

As always, thank you for great articles. You mentioned how hard it is to divide labors, which makes sense. But, at the same time, I see so many big deals split across four or five big banks. Why do they do that? Are these “mega” deals truly that difficult for one or two banks to work on themselves? Or is it more politics (or trying to keep them competing for lower fees)?

It’s probably a bit of both, plus the fact that on most of those deals, the banks do overlapping work. A company often hires multiple banks so the banks cross-check other banks’ work, and the company ensures that each adviser is doing the right things.

So if 4-5 banks work on the same deal, they’ll do many of the same tasks, and it’s not as if each bank is assigned to a different aspect of the deal. That’s actually even more depressing when you think about how many people are replicating work…

Yes I get all that but what are the tasks involved? I was an auditor for many years at KPMG and we worked long hours to meet a deadline – usually imposed by the SEC. But we were performing specific audit procedures to reach a goal-fair presentation of the financial position of the Company. My impression is that these people swarm over a company doing a lot of busy work – but isn’t there a goal somewhere. I just can’t believe that anybody has to work 100 hours a week for any reason, let alone just putting some financial data together for a presentation????

The difference is that in an audit, the tasks are fairly routine and follow set procedures. In M&A deals, crazy things happen, buyers start making unreasonable demands, new companies enter the picture, etc., so the workload is much tougher to predict.

No one actually does 100 hours of productive work each week, but people might be at the office that long waiting for assignments or waiting for clients to respond.

Hey everybody..I am from India..penultimate year doing Engineering from one of the best college that you find in the country..I like finance and banking and since the intern hiring season is on for many banks I am applying for these…but the problem is that in India there arent much opportunities in these fields.. So I am filing internship applications outside India in Asia Pacific region like Hongkong and Singapore……Do I stand any chance of even getting called for an interview,( I dont have a work visa) or I am just wasting my time….
PLS REPLY…

“There are cases where multiples junior bankers will be assigned to large or otherwise important deals – but when that happens, they usually work on completely different aspects of the project and it’s so large/important that you can actually divide the work.”

I believe you meant, “mulitple”. Just wanting to perfect these priceless articles. I’m learning so much and I’m so very grateful to have found this site!

Hi M&I, i have been a big fan and regular reader of the site for about 3 years. Thanks for putting all of this together, really appreciate it.

I have currently been working for about year in PWM. So i’m considered a relatively fresh graduate. I recently had the option to join a boutique Corp Fin team that focuses on the SME space in my country as an analyst. Think fund raising, M&A advisory etc

I’ve wanted to do CF but never really had the chance to do so. However, I’ve been told from an ex-employee that its not a great place to be as mostly the work is paper-pushing and quite brainless stuff. He also said that I won’t be doing financial modelling there. I have an aim to try move into PE or some kind of in-house CF role within 3 years.

What do you think I should do. I’ve trying for CF positions for about a year without much success.

I’d suggest you to speak to other people/ex-employees at the firm to “validate” if what you have been told is true. I presume there’s some level of truth based on what he/she said, though his/her experience will be different from yours.

If other people give you similar comments, I’d speak to the team and ask them what their expectations of you are and what you’ll be doing for them. Make sure you communicate yourself clearly, and tell them you want to be doing financial modeling. Ask them if you’ll be doing that.

If they say no, then I’d probably stick with PWM in the meantime and continue looking. The reason why I say that is because once you move once, its best if you stay at the new place for a year. The last thing you want to do is move, and then discover you don’t like the new role and have to look for new roles again. Your resume will look messy and you’ll have to work on explaining why you’re moving so often!

I’ve really enjoyed reading all the comments here. I’m not in IB, but there are other jobs with similar issues (I’m a college professor). Your discussion and tips are very helpful. I can see that probably in any competitive career that is based mainly on knowledge and expertise, the ones who put in the most hours get the most benefits (job security, salary, respect, etc.), up to a point. I think that point is where the person is so exhausted or unhealthy that mistakes start happening, or an illness puts the person out of work long enough for a replacement to be hired.

I want to be an investment banker. I’m really good at math and economics is another strong subject of mine. I don’t know if I’m cut out for 100 hours of work though, because I am kind of neurotic (overstress a lot) and am used to 9 hours of sleep even in college, versus other kids’ 4-7. However, I’d be willing to sacrifice it for a few years if I could make a lot of money. However, how much money does an investment banker actually make? I’m talking a competent investment banker at a big firm. The average salary for an analyst is listed around 100-120k but I know that a good analyst at a big firm would likely be higher.

Congrats on the site! It helped me a lot with recruiting and I finally got and offer from Morgan Stanley for and off-cycle internship within IBD in London. I just finished “Monkey Business”,and wanted to know if you think that being an analyt/junior associate is still as tough as they depict it in this book.
Keep up te good work. Thanks!

I’m comfortable with the idea of working long hours in investment banking. I’ve learned to accept it as a simple reality, but I have a unique question. I’m a big dog lover and with my current understanding of the time commitment of investment banking, it simply wouldn’t be realistic to own a dog. Is this correct or is it within reason to own a dog and still be an investment banker (analyst)?

I got into an argument about this today, with someone who (it is now apparent) reads this website and frankly the arguments made here simply don’t convince me.

You state that no other industries have as demanding clients, or as unpredictable workloads as Investment Banking, Rubbish! I’ve had the opportunity to work for both Investment Banks and Offshore oil service companies on summer and year placements respectively, and let me tell you having to redesign, source parts and manpower and oversee construction on an offshore platform gas pipeline to replace one that it is severed and set to explode at any moment is hell of alot more difficult than having to change a 22 page model. As are dealing with boat collisions, production stoppages and hundred of other events that can occur quite frequently but without warning ( and even when lives aren’t at stake, considering many platforms can earn up to £16 million a day in revenues delays can be no less expensive than a IB deal being called off).

And do these oil companies workers have to work ridiculously long hours? Hell no they simply structure manpower better through using nightshifts to keep the company going at full capacity 24/7 or through being able to easily move emergency work to other offices in other timezones with less work (which they are able to do through extremely good documentation and knowledge controls which brings me onto my next point.)

Division of labour? Impossible? Seriously? Come on this is just an excuse for poor management and processes again if engineering companies such as rolls royce say can assemble and design extremely complex pieces of equipment in short timeframes with 100s of workers all working simultaneously producing interconnected parts in offices spread across the globe, then I somewhat think (and know) that getting two analysts to work on a powerpoint at the same time ain’t rocket science. All you need is good documentation and change control and that frankly ain’t hard.

These arguments to me frankly seem as poor excuses for deeper underlying problems and any industry that claims working such long hours is a positive (as some recruiters to my puzzlement sometimes do “you wont work or be pushed harder anywhere else”) is one that frankly strikes me as rather masochist.

Hi – I don’t have the time or energy to debate these points in detail with you. I’m sure you work a lot in your industry. But go around and ask investment bankers and you will see that they pull crazy hours constantly as well.

The issue of division of labor: read The Mythical Man-Month to understand this. What analysts do is more like software development at times: extremely complex Excel models. Adding more people won’t make it any easier, it just creates more communication channels and slows down the process. You can’t compare it to cars because there the design is well-known and you are just modifying/improving it but how everything fits together is much more straightforward than with software or complex models.

Again, I appreciate the comment but just don’t have the time or energy to write pages in response. This site is a business and I spend most of my time serving customers and developing courses.

Feel free to disagree or think whatever you want – this is not a matter of life and death, and certainly not something you should spend much time thinking about.

While everyone works long hours, I’ve noticed patterns with certain people working consistently longer hours than others. Interestingly I am becoming convinced that there is no correlation between how fast people work and how long they work. In fact the highest ranked tend to be split on both end of the extremes.

Your thoughts? Is there any real hope that lifestyle would improve, even if slightly, as excel, ppoint mastery increases?

I really wanted to read everything you had to offer on this site before making a comment, but I just had to ask this question. I understand that IBD takes a rather long time spent at the office…fine. How do you attend to your personal health and hygiene? I wasn’t sure if you’ve covered this elsewhere even though I’ve read about 30%-40% of the site and didn’t see an answer for this. I really have been looking to get involved in this field, but the only setback is the hours that dentist and medical offices are open are the time you must be at work. When do you have time to go to the dentist, go to the doctor for an annual since there are a lot of models and bottles-haha, get a hair cut, or other personal things that you can’t hire someone to take care of for you?

I enjoy the site a great deal being that I haven’t found anything close to supplying what really happens and what it takes to survive and excel in this world.

I really wanted to read everything you had to offer on this site before making a comment, but I just had to ask this question. I understand that IBD takes a rather long time spent at the office…fine. How do you attend to your personal health and hygiene? I wasn’t sure if you’ve covered this elsewhere even though I’ve read about

Thanks alot for the heads up and advice, but I read the page to the link you supplied about a week ago. I didn’t really get the answer I wanted from there, but your direct correspondence has changed that.

By the way, this site is addictive. Truly a good idea for those looking to further their career as an Investment Banker. I look forward to learning more of what you have to offer.

I totally agree! I’ve discovered the site only recently, but in this short period I’ve learned so much about IB.
I am currently working within the Risk Department of a commercial bank to gain some experience as I have no financial background (I know this is not a must for IB, but I’m sure some experience (and probably a good looking MBA) will help me to get into IB within a couple of years).

Looking forward to see what you’ve got to offer us in the coming weeks/months/years!

Do u think an analyst, or even an associate, would have personal time to have and take care of a dog. Or r the hours too unpredictable? I know this is an out of the blue question, but it’s a factor to consider.

Is it completely uncommon for analysts to drop out before their two years are up? I mean more out of the “can’t deal with it anymore” type dropping out, not dropping out after a year because they only wanted to do it a year.

Nice article. I was just reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. In the book, he brings up an idea about a 10,000 hour rule. This rule, he states, is the amount of time that it takes a person to truly master a subject. Thinking in this vein, and adding to your section on specific knowledge, forcing bankers to put in +100hr weeks helps them to reach a point of mastery much more quickly than if they were to work 40-60hr weeks. Additionally, he discusses the idea of self-fulfilling prophecies in hockey where at young ages kids are selected to receive extra training based, unfairly, on their size (and thus the possibility that they’ll be good). This extra training actually makes them better, so that when the next selection period comes around they really are more likely to be successful than their peers. If we combine this idea with a belief that i-banking is a competitive atmosphere, where people are driven to be more successful than their peers (even in a team environment), it is possible to think of a theoretical game scenario where two players have the choice to work either 40 hours a week or 100 hours a week. If they both choose 40, they will progress at an equal rate, which leaves them equally likely to receive a promotion. If one works 100 hours a week and the other 40 hours a week, the player who worked 100 hours will receive the promotion. If they both work 100 hours a week, they again progress at the same rate, which again leaves them both equally likely to get the promotion. This is an example of a prisoner’s dilemma game, where even though the optimal choice (for the bankers-not the bank) is 40-40, the equilibrium is 100-100.

Brian, 10,000 hours at 100 hours a week translates to 100 weeks, which is *just* 2 years. Surely u dont consider analysts with just 2 years experience (not even associates) as Masters, even in such a simple field as i-banking, right? :)

This comment about the 10,000 hour rule as discussed in Outliers is misleading. If you read the book, he has a very specific definition for deliberate practice – which is what you were getting at – and it does not qualify to just do something repeatedly for 10,000 hours. The definition he uses involves deliberate and planned execution specifically designed to improve in small increments over time. It’s not fun, it’s not doing what you’re already good at, and it involves pushing your boundaries. I think he discusses this at length and it’s one of the reasons why it’s not the same thing as just “doing” something for 10,000 hours. I’m not debating the merits or the challenges of investment banking, but I am saying you’re taking the subject of the book out of context and watering it down.

I would agree with the above. Would also add that some banks try to run lean (i.e. the real sweatshops), which means that while you may be on a deal that requires late hours, you may also be put on something else. I think this is what really creates the long hours, at least in my case, because you get through the work for a particular client and then you have something else that you have to do that you can’t start until you are finished with work your client requested.

This is what the difference is between 70/80 hour weeks to 100 hour weeks.

Interned at a large European firm and two U.S. bulge brackets as a SA for IBD, and I think it’s really 50% demand and 50% the team’s culture.

There’s that unpredictable demand and inability to divide work efficiently, but when the team (I mean like SVPs and MDs) wants face-time… whew…

I always did my internship with the principle that SAs should be the first one in, and last one out. And, even though all those firms I worked for had lots of demand, at the European one I only worked about 80 hour weeks, where one of the U.S. bulge brackets, I worked regularly over 110 hours a week. (Sadly, I’m going back to the firm this summer…)

And it’s very very true that the “knowledge” aspects of it plays into a very crucial role. To give some example, I got a call three weeks after my internship was over from my VP about a pitch that I worked on w/o an analyst/associate (directly with VP because of staffing crunch). I was on the phone with him and analysts I worked over the summer from 10pm to 1am trying to transfer all the knowledge and work I’ve put into it so they can crunch out the final draft before a potential meet with the client next day.

Though no one can deny the long and brutal hours banking analysts work, I have never, ever under any circumstances worked, seen any one work or heard of a single banker spending 110+ hours on a regular basis in the office. So, Summer Analyst, either your exaggerating or you work for a bank who’s CEO is Satan himself and is headquartered in Hell and not Wall Street.

I’m an intern at the moment and am ‘liking’ it so far… but don’t you just get annoyed about being asked to do completely irrelevant and pointless stuff some time?? Does it happen regularly and how do you cope with it? I mean ur already doing 100hr weeks and the last thing i would want to do is make a model that took me 5 hrs just for some fat cat in the middle of nowhere to laugh at!

It seems to me that working 80-100+ hours a week are too deeply embedded into the investment banking culture to ever really change.

The only way it could change is for a leader in the field, or an upcoming leader, to change the culture of working ridiculous hours to meet every demand. However, the rewards are many for those that value the money (obviously), prestige, and opportunity to learn more about an industry than they’d ever hope to know.

I’d be willing to work 100+ hours a week for a great paycheck, but that’s just me.

The first step to change that embedded culture is “Not to do the same to other customer service executives ” (our own executives). If I forgot to do something important in a company service I won’t call at 2 am to the customer service executive even when it works 24 h/7 days at week; because the mistake it’s not caused by his fault, that’s my problem and my responsability. I preffer to re-order the things to do next morning or create a solution but not at coast of over-work from others.
If you do the same I’m telling and teach it to your children, little by little the world business culture will change. Except a big leader or a guru appeared and could do it radically…

Nice article, although I think you understate the correlation between the size of the fees charged by investment banks and the necessity of immediately addressing each and every client demand. Those who decide what size fees to charge (MDs) are naturally inclined to charge as much as possible while still getting the assignment. The problem with this is that it creates expectations with the client that his or her investment banker is working around the clock and catering to his or her every need. Presumably, if the fees charged were slightly more ‘reasonable’ (a relative term to be sure), client demands would not take precedence over, say, an analyst’s Christmas dinner. As a case in point, corporate executives have plenty of people working for them whom they would not ask or expect to work until 2am on a given night or to come in on the weekend, and the reason is that those people are not paid to do so. Senior bankers, on the other hand make a point of creating those expectations, in effect writing checks with the time of the people under them in an attempt to justify the size of a fee. Now I will grant that there are clients and situations that will demand 24 hour attention for one reason or another (ego, timing, past mistakes, etc.) but in general, I don’t think the correlation between fee size and client expectation can be understated.